Tips for storing files in the database

Is there a way to send and read binary data directly from memory,
without escaping characters, for SELECT and INSERT queries?

This is for a file repository, such as in source control.

I saw in the manual the section on bytea and binary data, but I don't
want to go through hundreds of megabytes of data escaping to send a
query nor unescaping to get the file back.

All the files I'm adding are already loaded in memory with some binary
modifications.  I'm aware of the large object type, but this requires
that I write to disk first, which I hope isn't necessary.